Small businesses seek city's help with high rents

POWAY -- As a growing number of local shopping centers get
remodeled, more and more of the city's small-business owners say
they're feeling sticker shock when their post-renovation rents and
related costs jump.

Toni Kraft, president and chief executive officer of the Poway
Chamber of Commerce, said last week that numerous small-business
owners had recently sought the chamber's help with the problem of
escalating rents.

Faced with the same problem itself, the chamber is considering a
move from the Poway Plaza shopping center at Poway and Community
roads, she said.

In the meantime, Kraft said, the chamber is helping tenants
facing higher rents because of renovations by encouraging them to
review their leases and meet with attorneys for advice. The chamber
is also trying to come up with joint advertising and similar
efforts to help the businesses cut their costs or increase their
profits, which in turn would make the rent increases easier to
handle, Kraft said.

The chamber also has asked city officials to get involved.

"We approached them and said, 'Look, this is our dilemma; what
do you as a city have to offer?' " said Kraft.

On Friday, Mayor Mickey Cafagna said officials are considering
creating a program that would offer small businesses money to help
cover their higher costs. Creating a place where small businesses
could temporarily move during major renovation projects, so they
could operate without disruptions, is also being considered,
Cafagna said.

Helping mom and pop

The affected businesses are turning to the city for help because
many of the shopping center remodeling jobs -- including the one at
Poway Plaza -- are being carried out with financial help from the
city, Kraft said. Known as the commercial rehabilitation loan
program, the assistance is designed to motivate the owners of aging
or dilapidated commercial properties to fix them up.

The Lively Center, the Poway Library Plaza and the Carriage
Plaza Center are among the local shopping centers that have been
fixed up with the loan program's help. All those properties are on
Poway Road.

"Landlords are great to step up to the plate," Kraft said,
referring to the call for renovations. "(But) let's not forget the
people who got them there in the first place -- the mom and pop
shops, the bread shops and so on."

In the case of the chamber, the organization is five years into
a six-year lease on office space in the Poway Plaza center, an
L-shaped strip mall nearing the end of a $3 million renovation. The
company that manages the property recently notified the chamber
that both its rent and costs shared by tenants and the property
owner -- insurance, common-area repairs, property taxes -- would be
going up, Kraft said.

While Kraft said she understood the reason for the increases,
she said the hikes will be hard on the nonprofit chamber's
budget.

Step Stone Management Co. manages the plaza. A message left
Friday afternoon for Jason Dick, whom Poway Plaza tenants
identified as their contact at the company, was not immediately
returned.